If you don’t like the idea of the Sisterhood helping out the Doctor, then try this one out 🙂

We’ve seen the Doctor use “excess” regeneration energy in the past to heal. Assuming he can’t use that on himself (or he would likely have done so already), potentially Missy could heal him. That would of course be uncharacteristically selfless, so there would probably have to be some strong self-interest in her doing so.

@tardigrade A lot of fans seem to think that the blindness and the regeneration energy seen in the trailers (and apparently from the upcoming three-parter) are linked. It could be help from Missy.

@devilishrobby Now now, it’s been a hundred years or so in the Doctor’s timeline since “Hell Bent”. That whole business is water under the bridge, and besides, surely Ohila knows he wasn’t in his right mind due to all that torture. And when he tells her he lost his sight to save an innocent human life….

Another theory I’ve seen floated as to why the Doctor can’t find a good surgeon by the time of “Extremis” is that his eyes are actually functioning, but his brain is damaged thanks to the lack of oxygen and that’s why he’s blind. And the only doctors who could help the Doctor (heh) in that situation would be on Gallifrey, which he isn’t on the best terms with now. But again, it’s been a while, he can use the telepathic circuits on the TARDIS to get there, and who wouldn’t want to help a war hero, torture victim, and now-disabled man who let himself be maimed for the sake of an innocent woman? 😉

Or maybe it will be Bill who figures out how to save his sight…turnabout is fair play!

Another theory I’ve seen floated as to why the Doctor can’t find a good surgeon by the time of “Extremis” is that his eyes are actually functioning, but his brain is damaged thanks to the lack of oxygen and that’s why he’s blind.

It did appear that his eyes could be restored (though maybe not his retinas, which would be likely candidates for being affected by oxygen starvation). So a neurological issue might well be in play. You’d think that sufficiently advanced medicine could provide a bridge around the damage- eg prosthetic eyes and a “psychic” interface bypassing any neurological damage. Probably resolvable on Gallifrey as you note, but of course that may not be an option. The Doctor did seem resolved to remaining blind, so it doesn’t seem there are easy solutions.

think it’s best to post this here, due to ‘next time’ spoilers, but I do wonder if the worst thing that can happen would be the first doctor in the vault. Or the second? Or a doctor no-one really handled very well (slightly aggressive; snotty; poorly dressed….?), someone who needs ‘basting’ and ‘cooking’. If the Rani or the Master got hold of one of the Doctors it could cause quite a crack in space and time. Nice way of re-cycling -considering the clock style opening credits and the ‘boom, boom, tick’ in the soundtrack -back to the beginning or the 50th anniversary, in its way.

I suspect medicine on Gallifrey isn’t that good – except for possibly stuff like obstetrics. Why have complex medicine when you can regenerate for everything – including a broken wrist? 🙂

So it becomes a question of ‘Why can’t the Doctor use regeneration energy to heal his sight?’ Given that he shied away from the question of regeneration when Bill asked about it, and also that the Thing in The Crypt/Vault seems to have some kind of energy coming out of it – is he using his regeneration energy to keep the Thing in there?

That would also explain why Nardole is so worried about him getting killed – the Doctor is much more vulnerable than usual.

Pretty interesting ideas there @thane15. A lot of people suspect it’s a Doctor incarnation, with a lot of votes for the Valeyard. But I think adding him to the story that starts next week would be overegging the pudding. 😉

Of course the Master/Missy could cause a big crack. If it hadn’t been for Missy, the Doctor would never have met Clara, and there would be no Gallifrey, no Twelfth Doctor, etc. Maybe the Vault has to do with the switchover from Saxon to Missy, which is why the Doctor has to be ready when it opens. That they have to be loosed for a while…

@tardigrade Yeah, he seems touchy about regenerating at this point. It could be because there’s a Doctor in the Vault, possibly a bad one. It could be because he has to fulfill his duty to the Vault first. It could be because he hasn’t saved Gallifrey yet! (He didn’t do it right away, after all, when he regenerated into this form.) But the starts must align at some point before he can do the Thing.

So it becomes a question of ‘Why can’t the Doctor use regeneration energy to heal his sight?’

Indeed- maybe we’re all missing something- perhaps he doesn’t have any regeneration energy remaining. Something that has gone on has meant he has used it all- perhaps used to heal whatever is in the vault? That would certainly explain some touchiness on the subject. He does say that he will “never see anyone ever again”. That’s pretty categorical, so perhaps he does think he’s now on his last regeneration. Nardole was specifically worried that the Doctor might be injured and not be able to guard the vault properly, which fits with him being more vulnerable than normal also.

Or, a little less dramatically, perhaps the Doctor fears that the use of regeneration energy would be detected by the vault-dweller and trigger the vault to open. He does seem not to want to show any weakness and that would be a dead give-away that something is wrong. In fact it may require a full regeneration for him to repair the damage, and he can’t risk that, as he might be even more vulnerable at that point, so it’s preferable to feign that nothing is wrong.

I suspect medicine on Gallifrey isn’t that good – except for possibly stuff like obstetrics. Why have complex medicine when you can regenerate for everything – including a broken wrist? 🙂

Yes- I’d expect that Gallifreyan medicine might consist largely of the application of regeneration energy :-). They would have access to the medical expertise of all of time and space though, if something more subtle was called for.

@tardigrade I don’t think he’s out of energy/regenerations, because Moffat already spent that penny with Eleven’s finale and it would be really weird for the Time Lords to restore his energy two regeneration stories in a row. We know there’s going to be a Thirteenth Doctor, too.

Or maybe he IS out but Missy gives him her regenerations out of friendship? Or Bill steps in to help? The other shoe hasn’t dropped as to her destiny yet. 😉

Personally, with all that’s been released about the 3-parter that starts Saturday, I think some of these issues (I.e. blindness) will be resolved in “The Lie of the Land”.

I don’t think he’s out of energy/regenerations, because Moffat already spent that penny with Eleven’s finale and it would be really weird for the Time Lords to restore his energy two regeneration stories in a row. We know there’s going to be a Thirteenth Doctor, too.

If the Doctor were on his last regeneration again (admittedly unlikely, but that’s why it would be a left-field twist), I wouldn’t expect the resolution to be the Time Lords restoring his regeneration energy again- there would need to be something else going on. Conceivably, there could be a new actor playing the Doctor without a regeneration also, weird as that might seem, eg have the Doctor’s brain transferred into a cybernetic body, or his consciousness transferred to another person (is Pearl Mackie the new Doctor?). I’m getting into very unlikely territory then though, obviously enough 🙂

I haven’t looked at trailers/info for upcoming episodes, apart from the series preview, in any case- so any bonkerising of mine is unconstrained by having too much information :). The fun isn’t so much in predicting what will happen, but more in constructing alternative futures, hence my description of such bonkerising as closer to fan fiction than a theory of to what’s actually going on. If it’s not crazier than what actually happens, then we’re really not trying hard enough 🙂

@tardigrade. Quite right. That is why I had so much fun working out the trajectory of the toy solder from Listen and was so attached to my final theory, (though I have pretty much forgotten it now) that I was glad that Moffat never provided an explanation for Orson though I still do speculate on he and Danny being twins, separated at birth by the devious Missy and the time travelling ancestor was a previous companion. There are a few candidates.

I must put my thought into my two pet theories about the resident of the vault, either Missy’s daughter or the President’s daughter, not because I think either remotely likely to be correct but because both are fun. (if the later is she Susan’s grandmother? Did he have to keep Susan hidden from the outraged President. Is it a young Susan in the Vault?) Maybe I should get back to my own writing. No time paradoxes to create headaches there.

@tardigrade and @janetteb Oh yeah, the bonkers stuff is just too much fun! I’m still hoping against hope it’s The Hybrid in the Vault. You know, the REAL one Twelve just couldn’t spill the beans on, not just to save Clara but to keep it and the universe safe. 😉

(I still prefer to think the Hybrid wasn’t the Doctor and Clara as the Moff has said, but just the Doctor. Long story…)

In the ‘Next Time’ spot at the end of Oxygen a boat was seen heading towards a Castle, in the boat appear to be four individuals. At the front a Doctor like person appears to be standing up, then what appear to be two females, one with curly hair, (River Song?), in the middle but most intriguingly of all a man with grey hair and a black cloak sits at the back!!!

Could the rumoured appearance of the First Doctor be coming earlier than predicted?

Great covers! And here’s the BBC synopsis of “The Empress of Mars”, Mark Gatiss’s script for the season, for those who haven’t yet seen it.

The Doctor, Bill and Nardole arrive on Mars, and find themselves in an impossible conflict between Ice Warriors… and Victorian soldiers. As the Martian hive awakens around them, the Doctor faces a unique dilemma – this time the humans, not the Ice Warriors are the invaders. When Earth is invading Mars, whose side is he on?

If this means another awesome monologue for Twelve, I’m all for that! Also, could this turn out to be connected to the events of “Thin Ice”? Brrrr…

Putting my theorising in here as it involves the next time trailer for The Lie of the Land:

So, if not for Bill consenting to the Monks, CapDoc would have died in the lab, yes? It’s irrelevant whether he’d have been able to regenerate or not, that body would have perished. and the specific reason the consent was accepted was because Bill acted out of love to avoid that happening.

In the next time trailer, we see Bill shooting CapDoc, and the synopsis for The Lie of the Land says “she may just have to kill her best friend…” – could it be that this is a fixed point in time? For the Monks to be defeated, Bill has to accept the death of CapDoc. And maybe because it was her that prevented it from happening first time round, she has to be the one who causes it this time.

@bendubz11 That’s an interesting idea, but remember that trailers don’t always tell the truth when it comes to Who, especially when it comes to who lives, who dies, and who kills who.

Also, it is a BBC approved spoiler to say that the Twelfth Doctor appears in all the remaining Series 10 episodes. How can his death be a fixed point and yet he’s still having wacky adventures and fighting those old-school Cybermen? If he does regenerate, why doesn’t his appearance change this time? How will this affect the numbering of the merchandise? 😉

Thinking some more over “The Lie of the Land”, I agree with those who think it’s going to be “The Wedding of River Song” 2.0. There’s a world gone mad because a woman wouldn’t let the Doctor die, and said woman has to shoot him dead to save the world — apparently, he’s the “link” the Monks needed to finish conquering Earth; if he dies they’re done for — and somehow he manages to live without completely regenerating. We have a tricksy alien race that is a collective rather than individuals, too. And River Song connections — Nardole, the coat the Doctor was wearing in the “Extremis” flashbacks…

Now, the awesome way this story could end would be with Bill not killing the Doctor even to save her own skin and humanity’s, because that’s the in extremis choice — “Without hope, without witness, without reward.” That she lets him live because he’s a single precious life, even if he’s hopelessly brainwashed into doing evil. And then that sets up somebody else shooting him and the regeneration-that-isn’t-quite-finished and the Monks are done for and the Doctor is sane. It would be a beautiful bookend to the Doctor sparing Missy.

But that’s probably not going to happen because Moffat and company love making Twelve suffer unduly. Incidentally why on Earth would the Doctor still be traveling with Bill after this? She screws everything up and gets him brainwashed and then she shoots him and everything’s hunky dory? Shouldn’t there be some real consequences for that?

@missrori very fair point about the misdirection of trailers, I didn’t consider that. My reasoning behind why his regeneration might be this early in the series is that I believe Moffat has said that this regeneration will be very wibbly wobbly timey wimey, plus we know that Capaldi had already filmed his regeneration scene before starting work on the Xmas special so there’s definitely some wiggle room for theories.

@bendubz11 Right, I think we’ve all heard chatter by now that the Twelve regeneration will be unusual. IIRC, Moffat says it won’t be along the lines of the Ten and Eleven regenerations, and could be as simple as the Doctor getting a knock on the head. Capaldi’s said his Doctor goes down fighting, which suggests that he won’t be a brainwashed puppet of the baddies at the time.

Perhaps his partial regeneration next week results in him, effectively, being terminally ill for the remainder of his run — more aware than ever he doesn’t have much time left, but trying to make the most of it. Maybe there’s Something he has to do before he can completely regenerate, such as do his part to save Gallifrey in “Day of the Doctor”.

Also…am I the only one who finds it odd that he’s wearing the “Extremis” flashback coat — the sad, worn one that suggested he wasn’t taking care of himself after River died — in “The Lie of the Land”? Brainwashed he may be, but why wear that old thing again?

Also, the synopses of the “back four” episodes of the season, starting with “Empress of Mars”, suggest that the Doctor, Bill, and Nardole just go back to having the usual wacky TARDIS adventures for a week or two after this traumatic storyline. A trip to Mars? Whatever happened to staying on Earth and watching the Vault? Will they just let Missy go once she’s helped out in “Lie of the Land”? And why would the Doctor keep traveling with the woman who shot him to (near-)death to fix her screw-up? There’s a reason River Song wasn’t a conventional companion. 😉

@pedant Ah, point taken! I really am annoyed by how this episode is being hyped. It just leaves me waiting for the other shoe to drop. And the show’s gone down this world-gone-mad route before. In fact, this one sounds like “Wedding of River Song” 2.0 (with some “Last of the Time Lords” thrown in): A woman didn’t kill the Doctor/let him die, so the world’s gone cuckoo and only a handful of characters remember the good old days. An imprisoned Time Lord is consulted. The companions lead a resistance. The villains can mess with people’s perception/vision and have religious connotations. Woman has to kill the Doctor, but he gets back up anyway without a full regeneration. I have to wonder, between this and the many references to River Song this season, whether this is not a total coincidence.

My thoughts: Missy’s enjoying her piano inside what looks to be some kind of containment cube. Perhaps it’s part of the Vault dismantled and rebuilt so she can leave it? I think this episode will explain a lot about how the Vault works and why she hadn’t already escaped, especially given all those times the Doctor entered it. Apparently the toilet facilities in the Vault aren’t much… 😉

Sorry folks, it looks like the boring invincible Monks are a standalone race with its own ruler, not a tool of a bigger/pre-established enemy.

It does look like a major plot thread is Bill trying to break the Doctor’s brainwashing rather than kill him outright, which Missy (in the Next Time trailer) suggests is the only way to break the Monks’ hold on Earth. I’m guessing they bust him out of the place the Monks are holding him in — where the white room is where he broadcasts propaganda — and bring him to la resistance’s base, or something and hope Missy can get through to him where others can’t. But assuming the regeneration-that-isn’t is the climax, then how does he get back to the room for that? And how does Bill get to shoot him? (The trailers really don’t leave much room for doubt that she’s the one who plugs him. Ah, cruel, cowardly Bill. You learned nothing from the Doctor in the end, did you?)

Image galleries for “The Empress of Mars” are going up online. From the looks of them, it would seem the tattered “Extremis” coat is now just part of the Doctor’s wardrobe after resurfacing for “The Lie of the Land”.

Now that we’re back to one-off episodes for a week or two I’m not paying attention to trailers, but I am really intrigued by the premise and wondering what the tone will be, given that this is a Mark Gatiss script. On the one hand, classic series villains like the Ice Warriors aren’t usually played lightly, but there is great potential for humor and even satire in the concept of Victorian explorers on Mars. If the cards are played right, this might be enjoyable in the way “The Girl Who Died” was (up to the tragic denouement, anyway). If nothing else, this one looks gorgeous.

On the question of the identity of the new Doctor, does anyone recall how close to the end of the previous Doctors’ runs there was a BBC announcement? In other words, in relation to the announcement of Matt Smith and the announcement of Peter Capaldi, are we overdue for an announcement?

@blenkinsopthebrave I was reading an article the other day saying that the announcement should be mid summer but if memory serves they did the big Capdocs reveal just after the 50th anniversary it was done as a big reveal show on BBC 1. My guess is that they will have to do the reveal announcement before the new doc starts filming for the Xmas special regeneration scene. Especially if he/she is one of the already speculated front runners for the new doc

@blenkinsopthebrave
Matt Smith was the earliest – he was announced almost an entire year before David Tennant’s last appearance and his first scene. Peter Capaldi was announced in August 2013, and Matt Smith’s last appearance was in December 2013. But Capaldi’s eyebrows had already appeared by then. 🙂

Tennant was announced 15 April 2005, Christopher Eccleston’s last appearance was 18th June.

From that lot, I think we can presume that if they can manage to keep it secret, they will announce the new Doctor as late as two months before their first appearance – probably because they reckon that the news will leak as soon as they have to film that first scene.

On the new Doctor, it depends whether they go for an all-singing, all-dancing announcement as Capaldi’s, in which case I’d say they’ll go for a time of the year when they’ll get a big audience for it and that largely rules out the summer months, I suspect. Maybe sometime around the August bank holiday?

But if, as Pip says, they’re going to try and keep a lid on it until they absolutely have to then it’ll be just before they start filming, so a month or two later than that. All this is precluding an unexpected leak, of course. And it has to be said that the British tabloid press seems to have gone dramatically feral of late.

Certainly they won’t want the announcement of a new Doctor to overshadow the buzz of the remaining episodes of Series 10. Although I’m by no means convinced that we won’t be seeing the new Doctor a bit earlier than the Christmas special.

Thanks for that. In light of your information, the reason I ask is this: if it was someone brand new, but uncontentious (eg, young white male with perfect teeth) then presumably they could announce it really early (like Matt Smith’s announcement) without it overshadowing the rest of Capaldi’s run. If it was someone the Daily Mail and their ilk regard as contentious (eg, a person of colour) then the BBC might feel that the media response may well overshadow the rest of Capaldi’s run. In that case, they could announce it between the end of S10 and the Christmas special. Or, a third option might encourage them to keep the lid on it for as long as humanely possible (ie, that, just as Moffat did with Eurus in Sherlock, the person in question is already “hiding in plain sight”).

Photo galleries are up for “The Doctor Falls” but they’re very stingy. Samantha Spiro’s character Hazran — who looks to be a farmer/matron — warrants portraits for some reason. Are the Mondasians are upgrading to fight beings like this… 😀

Yes, odd that she’s being given such prominence, but that to me suggests that most other elements of the episode are a) things that we’ve seen before e.g. Mondasian Cybermen or the Master or b) so spoilerific that the publicity department has been told to stay the hell away from them.

@craig Are you going to create a separate topic page for the Christmas special like for the JW announcement as unless we are all going to hibernate for 6 months it’s going to be impossible to miss all the talk and it will give us somewhere to bonkerise

@devilishrobby Let me sleep on that one and get back to you – you’re right that it looks like were gonna get a lot to discuss before Christmas. I didn’t think they’d release the trailer at Comic Con (last time they forbid anyone from putting anything up on the net). It’s kinda caught me unawares, and just before bedtime!

@craig I was only say it because between spoilers and BBC approved spoiler pages thes going to be a lot of repetition and duplication of effort otherwise an to be honest I am a slow one finger typist myself so if I can cut down on duplicating replays it would be nice 😃

Interesting that we may be looking at quite a populous TARDIS crew, which is quite old school. (Let’s hope it doesn’t go too Torchwood-ey). But I suspect that we’ll be getting something a bit more rotational, in the way that Nardole and Rory didn’t feature in every travel. Also wonder if Walsh is going to be some kind of Brigadier type figure, not a companion as such but a regular fixture in wherever the show is ‘based’. I kind of hope so because I really want JW to be able to shine and not be overshadowed by TARDIS full of characters. Because that’s essentially what happened to Peter Davison’s otherwise great Doctor.

Also have to say that the regular moaning about ‘box ticking’ over that Graun and elsewhere is depressingly familiar. Finding the same thing surrounding Star Trek Discovery which I’m currently quite enjoying (and which I think is about to pull something quite clever out of the bag). I get that all fandoms have their conservative element, but is it my imagination that it seems to be getting increasingly angrier and more intolerant than it used to be?